Monthly Archives: June 2013

As a prologue, The Supreme Court’s decision, announced yesterday, to strike down the portion of DOMA defining marriage as between a man and a woman was a huge leap forward for gay rights. Unfortunately, most of the rest of their decisions have been even larger steps backwards in terms of equality, and even staying within a reasonable interpretation of the Bill of Rights.

To begin with, the right to remain silent, based upon the fifth amendment right which allows citizens not to incriminate themselves, has been almost entirely gutted. According to The New American, “Guilty or not, suspects in the United States no longer have the right to remain silent. If they remain silent, moreover, that silence will now be interpreted as guilt and will indeed — despite what you see on television court and cop dramas — be used against that person in a court of law.” Essentially, the decision has stated that, unless a person explicitly says, “I’m choosing to use my right to remain silent,” that person’s silence – and everything that person does while choosing to remain silent – can be used as evidence. This means that, even if you flunked out of school in sixth grade and never learned anything about the constitution, even if you’re just being approached for casual questioning (no warrant, no subpeona), and regardless of whether you’re in custody, or have a lawyer, without being informed of your rights, the police are now permitted to function as though you do know your rights, and unless you tell them you want to use those rights, you don’t actually have any.

Perhaps it is my inner conspiracy theorist, but all the NSA scandal from recent news, wasn’t really news to me. I always assumed that we were being watched, our emails read, messages scanned. Whatever, it’s written, it’s admissible in court, don’t say stupid things in writing. Here, however, is where I’m drawing my personal line in the sand: The Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been gutted this week, as well.

“Now many of our Christians have what I call the ‘goo-goo syndrome.’ Good government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” —Paul Weyrich, 1980

The point of my rant is that I think we all need to be aware this is happening. We need to be aware, and the internet needs to react the way that it did when it wanted SOPA to disappear. This information, and the appropriate outrage, outrage that our rights are being taken away in droves, needs to be viral, it needs to be known by everyone, and everyone needs to use this moment in time to say, “Enough.”

As I write this article, I am more terrified for our future than I ever imagined I would be. I want a life with kids and a home and emotional and financial stability someday. It’s bad enough there isn’t enough money in the middle class anymore, and it’s bad enough that my generation has the worst employment prospects since the The Great Depression, do we really need to witness the end of our personal rights, too?

I just can’t. I don’t want to tell my hypothetical grandchildren that I was there when The Bill of Rights lost all of its meaning, and I really don’t want to say that I silently allowed it to happen. Do you?

When I was three years old (I’m guesstimating because who the hell knows for sure how old they were when stuff happened before beginning school), I watched my parents reach the final stages of Super Mario Bros. 3. This particular event was life-altering for a few reasons:

1. It scared the living bajeezus out of me, because I’m terrified of video game combat music and black backgrounds. I legitimately still have PTSD style flashbacks to how absolutely horrified I felt for days after seeing that. Those pixels may not be scary to you now, but I’m telling you, as a tiny child (who was afraid of everything, including mall Santas), that shit was the scariest thing I’d seen up close and personal on our big-screenrear-projection TV since the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz.

I’m telling you, if hell exists and it has minions, these are what haunt their nightmares.

2. My discovery that video games would be able to scare the crap out of me for my entire life was but the beginning of the lesson I learned that day. More importantly, I learned that you can cheat at almost any video game and skip almost directly to the end. In Mario 3, it was warp whistles. You just had to crouch down like you were making Mario take an imaginary poop on a couple of random bushes, and BOOM! you could just skip ahead by like 6 levels. That shit was incredible. It blew my mind. It made me feel so cheap and tawdry. We hadn’t earned that progress. My young mind was exploding, providing the first glimmer of the obsessive compulsive completionist, as I’ve mentioned before, I have become.

Not exclusively for humans.

3. Finally, I learned at a very early age that end-game content is rarely worth the long drive to reach it. You dump hours upon hours into a game and your reward? A shitty cut-scene. In Super Mario Bros. 3, it was still just a single screen in which the Princess thanks you for saving her and then makes a retarded joke.

This video may be of poor quality, and it takes this person significantly longer than it should to kill bowser, but I really enjoy the idea that someone video taped their game of Mario twenty some-odd years ago, and then filmed it on their iPhone more recently to upload that video to YouTube. What wonders have you seen, oh wise and ancient Super Mario Video Tape? Share your secrets. I won’t tell. I promise.

Pro-tip: If you’re going to start a conversation with something really inappropriate via text message, make sure you have the right phone number.

On a completely unrelated note, a very confused and random individual with a New YorkCity cell number probably thinks I’m a secret shemale who uses the nickname “Thick Dick Rick.”

Edit: An even more pro-tip is not to continue attempting to sext with that same phone number the day AFTER you’ve been told it’s the wrong one. And you definitely don’t want to call and leave it a voice mail (which I find particularly confusing since my voice mail clearly says it’s mine).

Tomorrow, I’m off on vacation… for about two months. I will be updating while I’m gone (phew, I know you’re relieved to hear it). However, I will be posting my updates from the beach. Sand between my toes, wind in my hair, salt water on my laptop; okay, okay, I won’t update from the beach. But I will be near the beach. Y’all should be jealous.

Alright, I’m back, and this post is going to be a little unusual. Even by my standards – or especially by my standards. First, I’d like to thank all my new subscribers. You like me, you really like me.

Now that that’s out of the way, I have a little confession. Just a teeny, tiny, little confession. It’s hardly worth mentioning. You probably don’t even care: I fell off the wagon. I’m back into the crack, the world of warcrack, that is.

Yep, I’m back to playing the WoW. Try not to be alarmed, I have no intention of raiding again. I’m just enjoying the view while I level my lowbies. Remember when that was something enjoyable? Something you actually did while breathing easy and had no goals in sight? Well, I may be lying a little, I’m leveling my lowbies in an attempt to get my loremaster achievements. (For those of you who follow me because of the writing stuff, today is not your post). Mostly, though, I’m enjoying playing WoW the way that I played during BC. I’m playing it the way that I play Skyrim (earmuffs, I’m about to say a dirty word) casually.

Casual gaming is only for people who can’t handle a cumshot to the chest without having a heart attack.

In all seriousness, though, it’s serene. The music in The Barrens brings me back to a simpler time. The year was 2008 and I was just a level 15 Blood Elf Mage, without a care in the world, and a convenient recruit-a-friend teleporter so that I didn’t have to actually run places.

This is what I look like when I run in real life.

Sadly, Barrens chat is no longer home to the best Chuck Norris jokes 4Chan can imagine. Let’s all take a moment of silence to mourn what The Cataclysm did to that beautiful, beautiful world.